Quick Look: Dishonored 2

The maps in this game are very impressive. Quite impressed with the AI also, that they know how to operate environmental switches just like your character (jump over ledges, climbing, turning off the electricity, etc.) except that they fail to tilt their heads. I wish my PC was able to run it a bit faster with better graphics.

This game is fantastic, just finished it today. Like the first game, I think you are doing yourself a disservice if you play the game low chaos, the gun/sword play combined with the powers and general feeling of mobility is a blast. Really looking forward to maybe diving back in when they patch in NG+. I didn't have any of the performance problems people are reporting though.

The current problem is that the game doesn't scale well at all. If you have a very strong PC, Like Jason probably has, that isn't an issue. But if you have a mid-range PC (like me), the game becomes very hard to play with constant frame drops and stutters. Lowering the settings does very little to the performance in this game for some reason. I have stopped playing to wait for a patch.

I feel like years of dealing with Dan has properly prepared Jason for raising a child.

A shame this turned out to be a "joke QL" instead of a proper showing of the game and its various mechanics. That's said it was interesting to see just how patient Jason is and just how ludicrous Dan can get when he isn't interested in the game being played.

@beachthunder: I ended up deeply regretting playing non-lethal in the first game. I ended up being so pent up I played Shadows of Mordor (not that SoM was a bad game). I think the greatest single thrill of my Dishonored 1 playthrough was when I accidentally startled a gard, I accidentally pressed a button I didn't mean to. The startled animation of the guard as I rendered him among the non-living was rendered incredibly well. I had to reload and finished the game never killing anyone, 'cause I have a hard time doing bad stuff when I have the option not to. The game's just lack so much of their potential when you play non-lethal though.

EDIT: As for Dan and Jason, previous interactions and dialogues have lead me to believe, that Jason has contemplated and carried out a mental murder of Dan. Thus resolved of frustration, he will put up with anything.

If I ever get around to playing this I will probably try to play like I did in the first game. Which is to say I'll try max the time stop power as soon as possible and then exploit that to solve most of my problems. I'd play the game like I'm Dio Brando but without the roado rolla da.

How much does Neil Degrasse Tyson cost?

According to Dan, Modern Warfare 2's Airport level must be the greatest stealth-action level ever created.

The look and atmosphere of these games look like ass

someone give jason a raise. love dan, but occasionally, his feigned naivete is incredibly annoying.

Weird how they kept saying the Deus Ex was conversely more closed-off when that's demonstrably not the case. Deus Ex is far more open and offers more options for infiltration as well as exploration.

I think the reason for no such indicator is very simple. Your visibility to enemies is not binary, in fact it has many layers, shadow, cover, distance, view angle, movement. And on top of that their detection of you is gradual too, depending on those above factors, with you being able to rectify your "visibility" on the fly. You're never truly fully hidden.

The one indicator you have is the crouch one, which sadly comes with a massive shadow on the edges of the screen effect (that I hate) and was not there in the first game.

The indicators are on the guards, with two layers, them starting to notice something, then investigating, and only after turning into open aggression. It's been a common method for quite some time now in several stealth games. It's a design decision that was adopted and I find it to be a much more intuitive and better solution overall then some hud indicator just for you, to have to look at.

I have a PC that can power through the performance issues.

My major problem with it is that even maxed out, with depth of field turned off, and any blurry AA off it still looks horrible on the PC, very muddy and blurry. When i first started playing it I felt like I was looking at a 360 game.

Thankfully someone made a SweetFX mod quickly for it that disables a lot of the internal bullshit filters that inept developers like to smear their games with and it now looks like a modern game, very sharp. It's actually pretty sad to see that the game itself can look very good, but that quality is just buried under heavy handed over application of effects.

@tennmuerti: I would argue that the indication in Dishonored is very often binary. You go from noticed to full spotted quite quickly. In the past "light crystals" also had varying levels. The idea behind having a hud element is that your situational awareness isn't as strong in first person unless you hack the FOV and as such you sometimes want to know that when moving from A to B you are in fact obfuscated from guards and won't get suddenly spotted out of your periphery. Personally I would even settle for that modern system of "radial needles" that grow with a swishing noise from the direction you're being spotted from. I do agree that the vignette effect around the borders of the screen is an ugly and distracting indicator of being in a stealth stance.

@veektarius: NDT swings too far the other way imo, to the point of being infuriatingly pedantic. Can't stand that dude.

@three0nefive: I'm not his biggest fan either, but sometimes I feel like a bit of pedantry is what Dan deserves. That's certainly how I felt when he started talking about swallowing sharks.

Another Dan show :( Quick Looks with Dan are turning more and more into Youtuber style content. This makes me sad.

@steveurkel:

Your mileage will probably vary wildly in terms of play time depending on how willing you are to explore the environments (the best part of the game by far in my opinion) on your own. 8 hours seems reasonable if you're the type of player to make a beeline for the objective and ignore non-essential side stuff. I think I got through it in about 25 hours, but I also tend to play stealth games pretty slowly.

Not at all true. Dan and Jason are good friends, and have been for years and years (since before they worked together at Game Informer, I believe)?

The thing about close friends is that they know enough about you to know how to tease or annoy in just the right way. Look up Dan and Jason's Encyclopaedia Bombastica: Soul Calibur some time.

@danryckert In your body there membranes (filters) which protect your cells from absorbing too many 'bad' substances. When you consume a lot of salt, the cell will notice that there's a high concentration of salt on the outer side of the membrane. Water will flow to that side of the membrane so that the concentration of salt at both sides gets equalized. Just how smoke will start at one side of the room, and eventually spread across the entire room. The problem is that the concentration of salt in seawater is so high, that your cells keep pushing water outwards, trying to equalize the salt concentration. This is why you get dehydrated.

That stealth battle on the stairs was riveting.

It doesn't perform as well as it should, given the graphics when compared to other modern games and the fact that lowering them all the way doesn't even help the weird FPS dips people were getting a lot in larger areas. They have a beta patch v1.2 that just came out that addresses the issues, though, at least some of them.

Overall, it's a great game, even on PC. It looks fantastic at "Low" settings even, and still performs better than the console versions as long as you have a semi-decent GPU. And it IS a great game as well... so the performance is weird and definitely unoptimized, but it's worth playing it still, for sure (and don't buy the console version instead, unless you have a low-end PC - they have the same issues with framerate drops, but it's even worse when you go from 30 to 20 FPS on console, instead of 60 to 40 on a decent gaming PC).

You could always get a refund if it doesn't work at all for some reason, though the game being totally unplayable seems to be rare - and likely a system, OS, driver, or obscure windows setting issue that is conflicting or causing issues.

I don't blame Steam users for posting negative reviews when they get a shit PC port, but the problem is that you really can't trust a simple "thumbs up or down" system like that to begin with, especially when it's being used as a tool to force publishers to take notice, rather than an honest review of "is it worth playing, despite the performance issues?" - which a much higher percentage of the reviewers would say "yes" to (I believe), than you'd see if you look at the Steam reviews now and it's just flooded with reviews moaning about terrible ports, but not actual critiques of the game itself while still considering those issues.

Jason's impression of Dan at the liquor store was spot-on.

Really liked the first one, but the story already seems weird to me. Delilah as the antagonist again? Especially considering at the end of Brigmore Witches you can shove her into a damn painting. It seems really lazy to just reuse the antagonists of the DLC for the first game.

Just to speak in defense of this games settings and performance, right now I am at the Recuperation area, and performance has been very good. At some point prior I caught a vision of a transparent greenish blob that quickly disappeared. Went I went back over my tracks, I saw it was the result of opaque glass in a door reflecting the light or reflection of a green glass lamp shade. I thought that so cool, cool as Jesus.

I have been yelling at the games difficulty. So easy to kill, so hard to spare life. But I am getting better. still pissed about being screwed out of that option with Hamilton, really wanted that last rune.

I'm playing with an antique i7 950, 12 gig memory (triple channel) and a Titan Black. Also a long 30 minute download today...

However, and this probably isn't the closest forum to post this but I am modifying what I said earlier, I am about ready to play another game for a while till they fix Dishonored 2. The loading times on PC are now consistently 5 minutes or so. And I am constantly retrying even if I am not killed because I myself am trying to keep at at low chaos...and I finally did it. Somehow they have taken an excellent game in my view and fouled it up.

AS FOR THIS QUICKLOOK...Appreciate a few things Jason did, are helping me out a lot. And I love that slide, but again like you I donts want to murder. About to get some of those rewire tools, and as importantly, got the blueprint for sleep darts. Already worked wonders in the last mission.

Dan.....................

This quicklook made the game look terrible. It's because they're just screwing around, which I don't have a problem with, but I'd much rather have a quicklook be about actually providing information about the game first, then shenanigans.

Also, I liked the first game, but this made the game look terrible.

How come no one ever gets tired of all the questions?

Oh my god Dan shut up. You ruined this Quick Look. If you were so bored by the game get someone else to sit in with Jason!

Jason "Whisper in the Wind" Oestreicher.

@warmonked: this is a rhetorical question, correct?

I loved the art style of the first game, but the lead on that (as well as Half Life 2) left the studio years ago. I Red Boxed this game for 3 nights and beat it without much fanfare, then went back to re-play the first one and said "A-ha! Now this is a great game!". Dishonored 2 is just your standard sequel; nothing special.

Looks cool, I should go back and finish playing the first game.